Over lunch today, I was talking to Gwyn and Laurie, two of the Ruby coders from New Bamboo - I work with them on a Top Secret Web Project for work.
We started talking about geeky things, and somehow ended up discussing a compression algorithm, where you would alphabetise each character of a message, and then replacing the number of instances of a character with a number, thereby drastically compressing how much space it takes up.
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Having bought an iPhone is kind of like being in an abusive relationship with an extremely attractive martial artist. You just know you should get the hell out while you’re ahead, but you always get lured back for another beating. Except in this case, you’ll be tied in to an 18-month contract, with no chance for reduced time for good behaviour.
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This morning, I stumbled across a news story about how:
1) Last year, the top 10 NHS litigation claims are responsible for £68m of its budget.
2) all 10 of these claims were related to problems with complications in birth or pregnancy.
This bothers me on a whole series of levels. The average annual brutto salary in the UK is just over £20K. This means that the top litigants, who were on average granted £6.8m of compensation, were given 323 annual wages as a lump sum.
Now, I don’t necessarily have a problem with that civil litigation suits can be a way to keep businesses in check, but the NHS is a government organisation which currently is running at a £512m overspend. The past year, the NHS spent £593m on litigation cases. For a government agency run on taxpayer’s money, this is completely ridiculous. The UK only has about 60 million inhabitants, which means that each and every individual pays £10 every year, just to cover the litigation suits.
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Magazine Publishing is the act of putting a magazine into circulation in some way or another.
There are many different types of magazines, such as magazines published by manufacturers of goods (such as “Liv”, published by Volvo about Volvo products, promoting automotive safety and general Swedishness) or services (such as Reach, published by an UK train company). There are trade publications, which aim to inform businesses and traders (such as MotorTrader, which is distributed to car sales outlets and manufacturers in the UK). There are B2B publications, such as information newsletters or magazines published by Microsoft, distributed to their customers to keep them up to date. There are business-produced publication such as PC WORLD Magazine, for customers of the PC World chain of outlet stores. There are official independent magazines, such as official Playstation 2 magazine, which is produced under licence from Sony, but otherwise independent. And there are completely independent magazines, such as most of the ones you’ll see in a magazine shop.
Needless to say, a single write-up cannot cover all the different forms of magazines, nor all the specifics about one type of magazines, and all ways of funding them. This write-up will take a closer look at how a magazine comes into existence, how it is run, and how it all works behind the scenes. A lot of it is applicable also for newspapers and for different forms of magazines, but by and large, this write-up covers the inception, production and distribution of a large (100,000 copies plus), monthly magazine.
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This is an article about the lack of a gender neutral 3rd person singular (he / she) in the English language, if this is really a problem, and a couple of words about the measures that have been attempted to solve the “problem”
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The six degrees of separation theory, while most interesting as a theory, has several major flaws - at least in practicality.
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To what degree does journalism education benefit a career in print journalism looks at the way journalists are trained and how the various training schemes can help a journalist’s career.
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This essay will explain what journalism regulation is, and why it is important. It will draw a map of the most common forms of regulation in the UK, before analysing their strengths and weaknesses as both guardians and servants to a democratic society.
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This essay will briefly outline a suitable definition of democracy and other terms applicable to its contents, before investigating whether or not democracy is a prerequisite of attaining a condition of global peace, security and stability.
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Charities. You probably have your favourite one. Protection of birds. Protection of wildlife. Food for hungry children. Recycling. War veterans. Gun victims. For every good cause in the world, there is a charity - an organisation that is happy to take your money to pressure politicians, or to use the cash to take more direct action. However, I believe that some charities may be a bad idea in the long run.
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